27 Year Old Ryan Allis Sells Company iContact for $169 Million

Aaron Houghton & Ryan Allis

Ryan Allis and his company iContact were sold yesterday for $169million to Vocus. IContact provides email marketing software that makes it easy for small to mid-sized businesses to create and send professional-quality email campaigns. Ryan co-founded iContact with Aaron Houghton while they were students at the University of North Carolina back in 2003. Today the company has 70,000 customers and over 1 million users. Ryan had said back in the fall that he expected the company to surpass $50million in revenue for 2011.

The sale seems like a great fit for both Vocus and iContact. While both sets of customers will see no change to their current services right now. Later this year customers will have the option of continuing to use a stand-alone product or upgrading to an integrated marketing suite combining email, social, search and publicity.

The deals terms:

Vocus acquired iContact for approximately $91 million of cash, $9 million of common stock and $79 million of redeemable convertible preferred stock, aggregating $169 million of total consideration, net of $10 million cash acquired.